The Year of Disappearances
Page 33

I didn’t have a plan for this meeting. I took his hand, shook it, let it go. His hand was cold. His face had a kind of arrogant handsomeness—an aristocratic nose, pale eyes, blond hair parted on the left side.
“I’m Malcolm Lynch,” he said to Walker, shaking his hand. Walker introduced himself. I should have done that, I thought, but my mind was full of other matters. How could I say anything in front of Walker?
“What are you doing in Savannah?” I said. He looked as fit as the last time I’d seen him.
He shook his head slightly, as if I’d been rude, but he seemed to find it amusing nonetheless. “Do sit down,” he said. “Join me for a drink.”
Walker slid onto a stool. I said, “No.”
They looked at me—Walker’s surprise genuine, Malcolm’s feigned.
“We’re on our way to dinner,” I said. “And then we have to attend a reception.” I wasn’t ready to face Malcolm after all, with Walker there. I added, “Perhaps we can meet at a later time.”
“By all means.” Malcolm’s smile crinkled the skin around his eyes. “We have some catching up to do.” He reached into his jacket, pulled out a case made of engraved metal—platinum, probably—opened it, extracted a card. I took it without reading it, slid it into my purse.
“Good-bye,” I said.
“Good evening.” He nodded at both of us, then smiled again as he watched us leave.
Outside, Walker said, “That was weird. Who was that guy? Why didn’t you want to stay?”
“He’s an old acquaintance of my family.” I pushed my hair back, tried to calm down.
“And why are you talking all formal-like?”
“I don’t know.” We turned a corner and there was the restaurant: an old house painted pink.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Seeing him was a bit of a shock. I’ll explain why, someday. Don’t let it spoil our dinner.”
What spoiled our dinner was Walker. He was restless, constantly moving in his seat, his eyes darting around the crowded room. He had trouble figuring out what to order, and later he barely touched his food. An older couple at the table next to ours kept looking over at us, wondering what was wrong.
It was a relief to return to the hotel, to change back into my trouser suit and go to the reception. There were no speeches tonight, just food and drinks and a band. The band was playing a pop song when I walked in, and some people were dancing.
Walker had already visited the punch bowl. He pulled me onto the dance floor and began to flail his arms and move erratically. When the song ended, I steered him to a seat near the refreshments table. I leaned against the wall nearby, watching the crowd, taking in the kaleidoscope of colors and scents and patterns, knowing that Walker wasn’t noticing much of it, if any. He slumped back in his chair, eyes half-shut, smiling inanely.
And so, when Neil Cameron asked me to dance, I went with him gladly. We danced a fast song, then a slow one; from the first moment we danced together, we fit. I stole glances at his face, his profile and deep-set eyes.
“You dance the way a cat moves,” he said. “Grace without effort.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
“A little,” he said. “Is that all right?”
“I guess so.” It was more than all right. Multicolored adjectives filled my head—pearl-colored wonderful, garnet-red divine, sapphire enchanting, all words I’d normally never use. I felt grateful that Mãe had taught me to dance—but this was nothing like our tentative steps across the airport’s tiled floor. In my mind Cameron and I were not slow-dancing—we were spinning, soaring out across a night sky.
He smiled at me, and I remembered too late to block my thoughts. Suddenly I felt clumsy, naïve.
But near the end of that dance, something strange happened, something I couldn’t put a name to at the time. A wave of intense energy rose up in me and passed to him. The feeling was akin to what I’d felt when I’d first kissed Walker, but its magnitude was far greater. Mãe told me some time later that I’d experienced what the French call a coup de foudre—a term variously translated as “lightning flash,” “bolt from the blue,” or “love at first sight.” To this day I’m not sure which term best applied.
Cameron stopped dancing, stared at me, and I looked back into his dark blue eyes. “Like star sapphires,” I heard my voice say, but he didn’t seem to hear.
Then the music stopped, and we moved apart. Three FSP supporters came up and took Cameron away, but he looked at me over his shoulder, mouthed the word later. I took a deep breath and looked around the room.
And there he was again; Malcolm sat at the bar, head tipped back, laughing. I glanced away, pretending I hadn’t seen him.
But when Malcolm left the reception a few minutes later, I decided to follow him. Cameron stood at the bar, surrounded by admirers. Walker leaned over the punch bowl, refilling a glass. I didn’t bother to tell anyone I was leaving.
Malcolm walked with long strides, his black trench coat flapping out in the wind. I turned invisible and began to run to catch up. When I was within half a block of him, I resumed walking, all the while wondering how to make him tell me what I needed to know. Finally I hit on a plan. The last time I’d seen him in Sarasota, he’d been trying to persuade my father to join him in researching and developing a new kind of synthetic blood. I could pretend to be interested in the research, offer to be a go-between to entice my father. The plan might work, I thought—unless Malcolm knew that my father was too sick to work. Unless Malcolm was the one who’d made him sick.
The route varied, but the destination was the same as the night before: we ended up at the vine-covered house near Oglethorpe Square. The small lamps on either side of its door glimmered. Malcolm strode inside before I had time to approach him. No, to be honest, during the last few minutes I fell back, uncertain and afraid. My strategy suddenly seemed silly to me. How could I hope to fool him?
I stood under the live oak tree, beneath its curtain of Spanish moss, waiting for an idea. Two teenage girls, both with earphones plugged into music players, walked down York Street toward me. They passed so close to me that I could smell the body lotion they wore: lemon on one, vanilla on the other. When they walked up the path to the house, I was close behind, and when they opened the door, I stepped inside just after them.
The girls moved through the dimly lit entranceway and headed up a curving flight of stairs. I paused long enough to get a sense of where I was—a long corridor loomed ahead, with several doors opening off it—then followed them. At the top of the staircase, another corridor began. They were halfway down it, opening a door.
After they went inside, I moved quietly down the corridor. They’d left the door ajar, and I could see rows of cots inside, twenty of them or more, neatly made up. The girls removed their earphones and began to undress.
I retraced my steps, looking into two other rooms whose doors were open. One was too dark to see inside, but in the other, five teenage boys were lying on cots. They were awake, but no one was talking.
The building was some sort of dormitory, I thought. I walked down the stairs. The lighting was too dim to see many details of the artwork on the walls, but one appeared to be a print of the painting that had hung on a wall of our house in Saratoga Springs: a still life featuring a tulip, an hourglass, and a human skull, called Memento Mori. When we’d cleaned out the storage unit, Mãe had given it away, saying she found it depressing.
As I moved in near-darkness through the downstairs corridor, I made out a large living room, a dining room with five long tables and scores of chairs, and a room with walls of bookshelves. On impulse, I went inside.
The only light in the room came from the streetlights outside, filtered by heavy drapes. I lifted one a few inches, and in the brighter light I saw a map of the continental United States on one wall, with circles drawn on it and pins stuck in clusters. One cluster, I noticed, was around Homosassa Springs; a smaller one was in southern Georgia. Savannah was marked with a circle, as were Daytona Beach, Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities.
Papers and small cards were stacked on a library table next to a filing cabinet. I folded back the drape and tucked it behind a hook attached to the window frame, then went to the table. The cards were blank. Next to them were sheets of paper—the loyalty oaths we’d signed the night before.
I was pulling open a drawer of the filing cabinet when I sensed movement behind me. I turned, and froze.
Malcolm shut the door behind him and locked it with a key he slid into a pocket. “Come out, come out, whoever you are.” He half sang the words.
He moved toward me. The light from the streetlamp glinted on his blond hair. He walked slowly, but with assurance, as if he could see me. I took a few steps to my right.
Malcolm altered his course a few steps to his left. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”
I veered right, nearly falling over a set of library steps. With each move I made, he moved directly in front of me. I stepped backward, toward the bookshelf.
“You know the old saying.” He was less than two feet away now. Then he lunged forward. “Curiosity killed”—his right hand grabbed my amulet and pulled hard—”the cat.”
I strained to pull away, but he was much stronger than me. The silk cord bit into my neck, making me lose concentration. I felt myself turning visible again.
Malcolm looked down at the replica of Bastet, then at me. There was no surprise in his face. “How nice of you to drop by,” he said. He let go of my amulet.
I rubbed the back of my neck.
“Shall we have our little talk?” he said.
Two sofas faced each other in the room’s center. He sat on one. I didn’t move. I thought how stupid I’d been not to realize the amulet would be visible. It had become part of me, so familiar I rarely noticed it.
“Don’t berate yourself unnecessarily.” Malcolm leaned back, utterly relaxed. “The house has an extensive security system. Even if you’d been entirely invisible, the infrared sensors would have detected your presence.”
Immediately I blocked my thoughts.
“That’s more like it.” He folded his arms across his chest. “We seem to do better as enemies than as friends, don’t we? A pity, really.” His voice had a slight English accent that he’d probably acquired when he and my father were postdoctoral students at Cambridge University. “But I am your friend, Ariella, more than you know.”
I said, “Right. And you’re my father’s friend, too. That’s why you tried to kill us.”
“Kill you?” He sighed. “Quite the opposite. I’ve saved both your lives, more than once.”
When we’d met in Sarasota, he’d told me about rescuing me when I was a child. He said he’d carried me out of range when the house in Saratoga Springs caught fire. My first memory was of that fire, but not of my rescuer.
Now he was thinking of a different fire, and he let me listen to his thoughts: that night in Sarasota, as the hurricane spiraled toward us, he came to the condominium my father rented (in a building called, preposterously, Xanadu). He intended to try to talk business with my father one last time before giving up on their research collaboration. In the parking lot he saw Dennis, my father’s former assistant, unloading a canister—some chemical necessary for research, he initially thought. But Dennis’s thoughts were full of guilt and confusion.
Dennis carried the canister into the elevator and Malcolm followed, making himself invisible. When Dennis entered the condo unit, Malcolm also entered, stepping around the canister and taking a seat in the kitchen.
“Raphael was asleep, and so were you,” he said. “I checked. But when I came back to the kitchen, I smelled smoke. Dennis had opened the canister and ignited the vapors. I asked him what in hell he was trying to do, and he kept saying he had no choice. From his gabbling, I think he thought I was God; since he couldn’t see me, he imagined that some immortal being had come to reckon with him. I hit him, mostly to make him shut up. Meanwhile the flames shot up and the smoke grew thick. It smelled of carbon monoxide.
“I turned my attention to putting out the fire. There was no extinguisher. I filled a pot at the kitchen sink and poured it on the canister, to keep it from exploding. That’s when your father came into the kitchen, coughing. I don’t think he even saw me.”
By this time, I was sitting on the sofa, opposite him. He paused to take a breath. Every word he spoke sounded sincere, unrehearsed.
“And then?” I asked.